Prestige and profiling service


Map version

 

Impact metrics

 

Journals

 

Journal Impact Factor (Thomson Reuters)

An aggregate measure of a whole journal's citedness over a one-year period. Not a measure for assessing individual researchers.

 

eigenfactor

http://www.eigenfactor.org/

Uses network theory to group journals and their citations and to evaluate their relative importance.

 

Alt-metrics

http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

Proposed new metrics methodology measuring impact outside of the traditional academic measures (citations, mainly). See the manifesto (link above).

 

Individual researchers

 

Citation counts: provided by all citation analysis services: see elsewhere on this map

h-index (developed by Jorge Hirsch)

A measure of citedness that distinguishes between authors with enduring, consistent high impact and one hit wonders'. An author has an h-index of 15 if he or she has published 15 papers that have received at least 15 citations each (i.e. it is akin to a median value).

 

a-index

Variation on the h-index developed by Jin Bihui. It is an average measure of citations received by works in an author's h-index publications.

 

g-index

Developed by Leo Egghe. Defined as the highest number, g, of papers that together received g-squared or more citations.

 

Plus other variants and derivatives

 

 

Current/recent projects and pilots

 

Humanities Indicators Project (American Academy of Arts and Sciences)

http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/humanitiesData.aspx

 

European Reference Index for the Humanities (ESF-funded)

http://www.fwo.be/en/FWONews2.aspx?ID=43288a9f-ff9b-4497-90de-a6b4541336a0

 

UK University Indicators (Evidence Ltd)

http://www.evidence.co.uk/index.php?page=15

 

EERQI (European Education Research Quality Indicators project (EU-funded)

http://www.eerqi.eu/

 

HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) Pilot Bibliometrics Project

http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/pilot/

HEFCE has been charged with developing a new metrics-based system as a foundation for future national research assessment exercises in the UK. The pilot exercise is testing bibliometric indicators on 22 institutions. Pilot completes spring 2009.

 

Indicators Development Group (Australian Research Council)

http://www.arc.gov.au/era/IDG.htm

The ARC is to develop a set of indicators for use in evaluating Australian research in future ERAs (Excellence in Research for Australia - the national research assessment exercise).

 

 

Citation analysis services

 

Free-to-use services that work largely on the Open Access literature

 

Citebase

http://www.citebase.org

Citation-ranked search service currently working on arXiv, CogPrints and some smaller collections.

 

Citec (Citations in Economics)

http://citec.repec.org/

Citation analysis service working on the RePEc database using CiteSeer algorithms. 180K articles, 4m references, 1.7m citations. Hosted by the Technical University of Valencia.

 

CiteSeer

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/

Computer Science database with citation analysis capability. Currently works on >1.3m articles and >25m citations.

 

Google Scholar

http://scholar.google.com

 

Mendeley

http://www.mendeley.com/

Mendeley is developing a citation analysis service (see here). There will be a paid-for premium service in addition to Mendeley's current, free, offering, and a likelihood that there will be a service for universities and industrial 'customers'.

 

 

Proprietary services

 

Web of Science (Thomson Reuters)

http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/scientific/Web_of_Science

 

Scopus (Elsevier)

http://www.scopus.com/scopus/home.url

 

 

Researcher information services

 

Research Crossroads

http://www.researchcrossroads.org

Self-registering searchable service that collects data on researchers in science and medicine: their research, grant funding, publications, affiliation, biography, etc. Also provides searchable databases on funders, grants awarded and clinical trials. Also acts as a networking tool.

 

Academia.edu

http://www.academia.edu

Authors self-register themselves, their departments and universities/institutions. Authors add details of their papers. Currently has around 24K people and 87K papers.

 

ResearcherID

http://www.researcherid.com/

Thomson Reuters' author profiling service. Searchable researcher/research database with the benefit of Thomson Reuters' unique author identifier system (see Author Identifiers topic).

 

ResearchGate

https://www.researchgate.net/

Scientists' network with over 180,000 members to date (November 2009). Scientists add details about themselves and their work, upload full-texts of their papers, and discuss relevant topics. Has just introduced a 'micro-article' idea, which is to encourage scientists to write and upload brief versions of their latest work for rapid communication and discussion. There is also an embryonic job advertising facility. Free to join and use. It is not clear how this initiative is supported fiancially, though it claims to be bulit 'by scientists for scientists'.

 

bibapp

http://bibapp.org/

For use as an institutional 'campus gateway'. Database of researchers, their publications and their institutional affiliations (group/department/school, etc), enabling a search for 'campus experts'. Accepts deposits in popular formats (e.g. Refworks) and provides automatic rights-checking using SHERPA RoMEO. Makes SWORD-compliant deposits to the institutional repository or other locations.

 

VIVO

http://vivo.cornell.edu/

Developed at Cornell University Library. A campus research discovery tool. Researchers can manage their own page/profile, which usually links to their personal web page and departmental or other affiliation web pages.

 

Scholar Universe (ProQuest)

http://www.scholaruniverse.com/productinfo.jsp

2 million scholar profiles generated from ProQuest's databases.

 

Selected Works (Berkeley Electronic Press)

http://works.bepress.com/

Authors create their own profiles for a campus profiling service.

 

 

Future directions?

Leo Waaijers has produced a report for the Knowledge Exchange (a partnership of JISC, SURF, DFG and DEFF in the UK, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark respectively).  The report outlines some possible future directions in these areas - and others.  It is currently being considered by the Knowledge Exchange partners and further work may be commissioned.  The report is here.